Tickets available at: The Queen’s Department of Drama office between the hours of 9am and 3:45pm Monday through Friday. Tickets will also be sold at the door.

It is a hot summer evening in Montreal. The city is seething with discontent over stalled lives and dim prospects. The neighbourhood women of la rue Fabre gather on their balconies to distract themselves with gossip and bickering. Meanwhile, across the city, on la Main, women are pitted against each other to compete for the "best" jobs by any means they can. This is a city on the brink of rebellion. Michel Tremblay's Counter Service is set in 1969, when tensions were rising all over Quebec and the "Quiet Revolution" was about to erupt in violence, but the play also seems to speak to us about the protests in Montreal during the summer of 2012.

Under the direction of Queen's Department of Drama Head, Craig Walker, who directed Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles Soeurs at Queen's in 2003, Counter Service is a frank, funny and hard-hitting play about the life of the lower classes in 1969 Montreal. The play was first produced in French that year as En Pieces Détachées, but John Van Burek's brilliant translation, Counter Service, was only produced in 1995 at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. The play will be followed by a comedic afterpiece, Lives of the Great Waitresses, an acclaimed short play written by Nina Shengold.